A very interesting study of the bootleg Marvel and DC comics that appear every week on the Net by David Brothers and David Uzumeri has led them to conclude that “there’s a leak somewhere in (Marvel’s) supply chain.”  Brothers and Uzumeri note that while the DC scans trickle in one-by-one after 2pm on the release day, Marvel’s appear all at once and in pristine condition with a remarkable uniformity in the scans, both in the size of each scanned page and in the DPI, which is typically 72 throughout.

 

In a lengthy article on 4thLetter.net, Brothers and Uzumeri make an interesting case that “someone is getting access to a PDF (of the Marvel titles), or something, and dumping it to JPG before releasing it to the net.”  They note that the fonts used on the covers don’t match those on the actual comics, which they ascribe to the tool that the scanners are using to dump the jpegs, which can't match the actual fonts.  They also found that the Marvel bootlegs feature placement of titles and credits that would only occur in a print copy.  Their arguments get pretty technical and they may well not have all the answers (they are careful not to try to appear too definitive), but they have definitely uncovered some bizarre differences between the way that pirated Marvel comics reach the Web versus the manner in which the illegal versions of DC’s do.

 

However it is being done, Brothers and Uzumeri’s study demonstrates once again the fact that pirated digital copies of comic books remain a major problem for publishers.  How could they not be with every book from the Big Two publishers available online for a pirated download by 7pm Eastern Time on Wednesdays?